


Someone To Ride The River With

by xel



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Just a collection of one-shots and ficlets, M/M, Probably mostly fluff/humor and maybe a bit of angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-09-20 19:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9508763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xel/pseuds/xel
Summary: Jesse McCree and Hanzo Shimada: a mismatch made in moments. (Some McHanzo ficlets.)Ch.1Jesse’s looking real hard at the ring on his finger - the emblem of the Shimada clan embedded in gold and jade.Jesse’s thinking real hard about the mission in Nevada (a second home to him, from his time in Deadlock) and the bar he dragged Hanzo to, the shots of whiskey, and the laughing and smiling to cover their spying on a target - Julius Something and his illegal weapons dealings with the lawless gangs of the West.Las Vegas is barren now, a weird apocalyptic city with a bunch of rusty old casinos and ransacked hotels. It’s got about a hundred still-operational bars and two drive-thru chapels. Just enough around to make a couple bad choices.





	1. Make Good Choices

**Author's Note:**

> I ask for prompts on my tumblr and I get enough McHanzo requests that I think it's worth creating a one-shot collection for them. I'm a collector at heart, I like to have them all in one place. ;) 
> 
> Please enjoy! Updates will come as I fulfill prompts.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> McCree and Hanzo are on a mission in Nevada. Nothing bad ever happens in Nevada.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: “Don’t panic but I think we might have accidentally gotten married…”
> 
> Here's a little crack for you. ;)

Jesse’s looking real hard at the ring on his finger - the emblem of the Shimada clan embedded in gold and jade.

Jesse’s thinking real hard about the mission in Nevada (a second home to him, from his time in Deadlock) and the bar he dragged Hanzo to, the shots of whiskey, and the laughing and smiling to cover their spying on a target - _Julius Something_ and his illegal weapons dealings with the lawless gangs of the West.

Las Vegas is barren now, a weird apocalyptic city with a bunch of rusty old casinos and ransacked hotels. It’s got about a hundred still-operational bars and two drive-thru chapels. Just enough around to make a couple bad choices.

Based on the glimpses of last night slamming back into Jesse’s mind, he’s willing to bet he’s made at least one _really bad choice_.

Based on the fact that he and Hanzo are squished into the backseat of a car so old it doesn’t even hover, limbs haphazardly thrown over themselves and each other, he’s willing to bet it was probably at least two.

The morning sun is just breaking over the skyline, burning, and Jesse squints as it reflects off the ring into his eyes.

 _Aw shit,_ he thinks, and looks over at Hanzo.

Hanzo was fortunate enough to get the side of the seat that has a back, so he’s not half squished into front seats and falling through the crack onto the floor like Jesse. Despite all of this, and the general appeal of Hanzo’s entire … body … he looks real rough. Hasn’t-had-a-proper-bed-in-months-drank-himself-blind-last-night rough.

“Hey, Han,” Jesse says, shakes his shoulder.

Hanzo’s eye fly open, wild and restless. Jesse's more startled than anything and he retreats into the little room available. Hanzo looks around for half a moment, barks “move!” opens the door closest to his head and spends the next minute hurling into the dirt.

Someone yells _“hey!”_

Jesse blinks like a fool, and then thinks better of himself and shimmies out the other side.

There’s a man handcuffed to the door handle Hanzo’s currently using to support his weight as he dry heaves. _Julius Something_ , Jesse’s mind helpfully supplies. _Right_ , Jesse thinks.

“ 'morning,” Jesse says, his throat hurts. The sun hurts his eyes, his head feels light; it's rough, man, it's real rough.

Julius and Hanzo both send him withering glares. Julius from his spot, standing next to the car. Hanzo from beneath his bangs.

 

* * *

_The previous night, 2:38 a.m._

“Let us get married,” Hanzo suggests. The way his voice doesn’t inflate at all leaves Jesse wanting something - his drunken haze doesn’t have a word to supply here but he hears himself say: “Alright darlin’,” and if it sounds a little desperate, well no one’s sober enough to care.

They’re getting married because Julius is in this chapel, sitting just behind them, about to make an exit (waiting on a buyer maybe - a chapel’s a pretty inconspicuous place to wait it out, even a gaudy Vegas one) and because all this seems very rational in their fuzzy minds, and because Hanzo can’t hold his alcohol, and because Jesse, although slightly more rational, can’t see anything wrong with being hitched to Hanzo Shimada, no matter the circumstance.

“You gotta be our witness, buddy!” Jesse whirls on Julius, slaps him pleasantly on the shoulder.

“Oh-” says Julius, surprised, “sure fine, just make it quick.”

“Ain’t gotta tell us twice.”

They all go up to the alter, Julius standing to the right of Hanzo.

They exchange words and Jesse repeats the vows given by the priest. Hanzo has his own vows which amount to:

_I promise to protect you with my life, because Overwatch is the family who has not rejected me, who I have not tried to kill, and you are the rock of Overwatch, so you are my rock, too._

To which Julius, perplexed, demands: “Overwatch?!”

To which Hanzo responds, drunkenly: “You will not ruin my wedding!”

To which the priest pronounces them man and man.

At which point they exchange their rings (Hanzo’s ring … Jesse’s necklace) and kiss and Jesse feels like he’s flying high and burning alive and it’s the happiest and drunkest he’s ever been.

And then Julius is making for the exit and Jesse's vaulting over pews, fumbling with the cuffs locked around his belt.

They arrest Julius, and Jesse blacks out.

* * *

Jesse blinks against the sun, the events of the night replaying themselves vividly. He looks at Hanzo and Julius in equal measurements. Julius looks pissed to the high heavens. Hanzo still looks sick, Jesse focuses special attention on the arrow head necklace just above his collar. He'd been so glad to have found that thing, just a kid in the desert, digging through the sand.

He clears his throat, turns his attention to Hanzo.

“Don’t panic,” he begins, because that’s how these conversations go. Hanzo watches him in a mild daze with a deep frown. “I think we might’ve gotten hitched last night.”

“ _Y’all definitely got hitched last night_ ,” Julius grumbles.

Hanzo surprises the entire crowd of two when he straightens a bit, wipes his mouth.

“I am aware,” he says flately. “I am not the type to black out, Jesse.”


	2. A Low Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jesse is in the midst of a full blown panic attack when Hanzo finds him. They all have their demons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "I'm dying."
> 
> Just a quick heads up: suicide mention herein, and a panic attack.

Lately, they only talk during missions. 

Hanzo isn’t sure what to think about this. McCree is one of three people he holds frequent conversation with in Overwatch, and the lull in their camaraderie makes the ache of the empty space around Hanzo that much more prevalent. 

Every moment of every day spent awake at the watch point is uncomfortable. For a number of reasons: distrust somewhere closer to the top.

Hanzo does not blame them.

His suffering is self-imposed, his motives self-serving. It is only natural that the members of the original Overwatch, torn apart so long ago by infighting, would be wary of a person so clearly the opposite of a team player.

This is why it has been nice to have McCree in his peripherals.

Hanzo exhales slowly. His calves are sore from sitting seiza for so long, and there is a twinge in the side of his scalp which feels suspiciously like the beginnings of a headache. Meditating has done nothing for him, and so he rolls out of his position and stands. 

It must be nearing three or four in the morning and everybody will have gone to bed awhile ago. This is the best time for Hanzo, to find peace, to reflect. In the daylight he roams in the vacant areas of the facility, hoping to avoid those he can, and keeping conversation short with those he cannot. 

He is passing a usually empty training facility when he hears shots like those from a gun. And knowing the frequency and the reload time of this particular weapon, he veers towards the door.

Lately, they only talk during missions. Hanzo is honestly a bit tired of the trend.

* * *

When Hanzo enters the room, Jesse is there. 

There is something unsettling about the way he stands, ridged and unhinged. Hanzo clears his throat to alert the man, but doing so is a mistake. 

When Jesse turns on him, he turns with all the mindlessness of a raging bull, eyes wild, hands up.

He fires his gun. 

If Hanzo had been anyone else, he would have been shot. But Hanzo is not, and he has dealt with assassination attempts. He has also dealt with this particular brand of madness. The bullet hits the wall opposite the open door behind him, lodges deep into the concrete. 

Jesse’s hands shake around his peacemaker and then his grip falters and it falls through to the ground with a resounding clack.

“McCree,” Hanzo says carefully, walks slowly toward him, kicking the gun away as he does so. Any other day, Jesse would have likely been offended by such disrespect. Tonight, Jesse looks down at his hands like they are an enemy, and then brings them to his face to hide the way he is falling apart behind them. 

“’m sorry,” he croaks. 

Hanzo notices the targets behind him, how the hits to them are erratic and rarely accurate. 

“What is wrong?” Hanzo asks, places a hand hesitantly on Jesse’s shoulder. This seems to bring him back to himself for a moment. 

“I nearly killed ya…” Jesse breaths.

“Hardly,” Hanzo tells him, though it is not entirely true. Jesse sinks to the ground and looks on the verge of hysteria. Hanzo follows him down, falls back into seiza opposite him.

 

* * *

 

 

Hanzo knows what a panic attack looks like. Can remember the flashbacks, so vivid they are indistinguishable from the present. Hanzo recalls the crippling inability to even _move_ , the way even the air seemed to smell of blood. How does a mind recreate a thing so entirely that even the smell can be mimicked? The gods must be merciless heathens.

Hanzo remembers killing Genji. How nothing in his life, no murder before or since has ever or will ever compare to the knot in his throat that day, the blood on his hands. The inability to breath for days, it seemed; forever, it still seems.

He wonders where Jesse is. What he is seeing, and feeling, and breathing. What he must relive at three or four in the morning. Or what he has been reliving all these weeks in his withdrawal into himself, into the place in his head which devours him.

“I’m dyin’ Hanzo,” Jesse tells him through clenched teeth, tears at the edge of his eyes, “feels like I’m fallin’ apart a little more every day. Feels like I’m one bad night from puttin’ a bullet through my brain.”

“I can help you,” Hanzo tells him. 

“Ain’t no one who can help me, Han” Jesse says, he grips the side of his head, squeezes his eyes shut, and when they open again, their soft like Hanzo remembers, has come to … expect. Jesse laughs a little, for lack of anything else to do.  “I nearly killed ya. I ain’t safe ‘round here.” 

“As safe as we all are,” Hanzo tells him sincerely. “I can help you. This pain I know.” In a moment of valor Hanzo has rarely displayed, he leans forward, wraps an arm around the back of Jesse’s head, and pulls him close.


	3. Partner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jesse makes a fatal mistake. Hanzo's there to bail him out.

Mercy doesn’t show.

_Heroes never die._

She’s right, ‘course – but then, they both know he ain’t never really been one.

* * *

(Nothing comes easy to Jesse McCree, turns out, not even dying.)

He’s finding it hard to breath around the knot in his throat. For a moment, he thinks it’s probably congealed blood, then realizes, a stuttered heartbeat later: it’s just panicked air - pushing out of his lungs; nothing moves around it. The dread is consuming. It’s flowing through every vein in his body, numbing his arm, his vision is tunneled, he is burning – and Jesus, damn, it’s hot as hell.

Jesse’s had panic attacks before; he knows one when he feels it. Unfortunate that for as much as it feels like death on its own, nothing’ll quite compete with the pain of the actual act. Who’d’ve guessed? Who’d’ve thought to wonder.

He’s praying; in the position to do it and everything.

Down on his knees, arms tied behind him; the sun at its apex in the blue, blue sky. Not a cloud in sight. _High noon._

And Jesse’s never been a particularly religious man; he grew up with Catholicism branded on his forehead by holy water, under the watchful eye of a dozen stained glass saints in a stucco church a hundred miles outside Albuquerque – the skin of his knees chafed from the friction of the desert sand, his Sunday Best, and the kneeler.

He remembers leaving it being easy; his family gone and his faith along with them.

He still prays for Mercy.

Even as a talon foot soldier raises Jesse’s peacemaker to his head.

As he hears the quiet clicks of that faithful hammer being pulled back. His eyes flicker to the west, the fighting happening there. Mercy’s a tight 5 minutes, but she could make it; he thinks she will.

Even at the audible pull of the trigger.

He’s stopped mid-thought on somethin’ Gabriel told him a million years ago - standing, frozen, white as a sheet to the backdrop of a memory; Blackwatch at his back porch. A burning, burning shotgun muzzle pressed to his chest (the scar’s still there) - he’d forgotten until just now…

_“This bullet’ll have to half an infinite number of halves just to hit you, Jesse McCree.” Reyes. “But it will.”  
_

(For a flitting moment there, redemption stuck in his throat like mucus on a hot day.)

* * *

There’s an arrow through the mercenary’s sleeve, yanking it off course, displacing it. The bullet tears through Jesse’s shoulder and it burns, _fuck, shit, damn_ , but it’s a hell of a save.

“How typical,” says Hanzo, somewhere very, very far off (he's in Jesse's ear). His voice is shaking. 

And then the soldier falls forward, an arrow in his back. Jesse falls forward, too - breathing deep in the dirt, wet wth something. Jesse's too proud to admit to the tears.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos are very much appreciated! So are comments.


End file.
